Brakes are important

Personal

Friday morning I got up at five to head over to Cool Springs for the morning skate. It was a rainy morning and as I got about 1/2 way there I got a little surprise. When coming to a stop light I press on the brakes and the pedal goes to the floor, barely slowing me down. Not good …. but it was 5:30 am and traffic was very light. Their was no one in front of me so I was able to turn off. Took a moment to gather my thoughts and then kept going, pumping the brakes to slow down. Yes can you say I’m getting dumber by the moment.

A mile or so down the road I came to my senses and headed home. Lucky I work from home otherwise it would have made for a interesting day for Kay. At about 6pm I got a chance to take a look at what the problem was and after a little looking found a line had gone bad. In the fall I had replaced the right front caliper and when doing so rotated the brake line the wrong way. Because of that it was resting on the boot of the ball joint and it had rubbed a hole in it. So after Kay came home from work I went to the parts store and got a replacement. Actually ordered one for in the morning as it was in the local warehouse but not at the store.

Saturday picked up the cable and replaced it, rotated the tires at the same time. And when replacing the cable made sure to pay attention to how the cable was resting. I’ll be checking it off and on for the next few weeks to. I could only image what could have happened if it failed some other time.

2 weeks with the new box

Personal,

Well it’s been 2 weeks now with the new box and no Windows, a little different not using Windows for work but it hasn’t required any more effort. Some of the apps we used before for personal things, Quicken and iTunes, their are open source alternatives so we haven’t missed them yet. On the work side for the windows only apps I need, which are 2, they are on a server that can be accessed via tsclient. Their is one app I don’t have, Microsoft’s Communicator/Net Meeting, wihich is missed somewhat. We are not a company that traditionally communicates via chat so it’s use is still taking shape. I had hoped the web version was installed on the same server with the other apps but that is not the case. Maybe IT will get to that.

So far I’m pleased… except for the sound card taking a dive this morning. Lightning struck the power line outside the house which seems to have blown the integraded sound on the mobo. I never lost power and nothing else seems to have been affected so may have to scrounge a PCI one up. For these last 2 weeks I’ve also been using Evolution for mail, work and personal. I’ve switched back and forth between it and Thunderbird over the years but have never been able to stick with one or the other. It’s nice that both use mbox format for storing messages, makes copying that much easier. But I think it will be back to Thunderbird now and I’ll use the Lightning add on for Calendar functions.

XP migration disapointing

Personal,

Over the weekend I decided it was time to finally replace the PC that had been our main workhorse for the last 3 to 4 years. What prompted it was a month or so ago two of the three DIMM slots on the motherboard went bad leaving 256mb to work with. That wasn’t going to cut it with everything that goes on for work so I’ve switched to using the laptop for now. It’s got plenty of speed but hooking up all the extra stuff gets old everyday. So I headed out Saturday to pickup some new parts… I’ll say it now I should have waited.

I last pieced together a machine in 02/03, I think, when everything was IDE and DDR wasn’t near mainstream. My have things changed. Instead of shopping on the internet I went to a local shop and got a new motherboard, processor, and memory. Then went back to the local Circuit City for a power supply… should have thought of that one. So after using GParted to copy the drive to a spare for testing… that software rocks !!! I started in with the new stuff.

The first problem I had was getting the new board to reconize an IDE drive, as it has only one IDE connection. Fiddling with BIOS settings didn’t seem to help. So since the new board was geared to SATA went back and picked up a drive, and a 3.5 USB enclosure for the old one, and figured I migrate that way. Boy was I wrong.

It’s now late on Tuesday and I have just now been able to “attempt” to have the XP Pro CD recognize the new SATA drive. I should have known better than to assume after all these years migrating would be as simple as copying a drive, letting windows repair the install, and then away we go. This could be the “straw that breaks the camels’ back” with me and forking out $$$ for an OS. After a bit of googling the last two days I know now exactly what I need to do, unfortunately getting there might take a minor miracle.

The short of it is something like this. XP does not have SATA drivers on the CD you have to load them from a floppy during boot. After a considerable amount of searching I found what should be the correct drivers for the board I have but when downloading them from Intel’s site… no go. Intel has good instructions don’t get me wrong. But drivers are a quirky beast and it seems I’m not having luck finding the write ones. Not to mention putting them on a floppy, I haven’t used a floppy since 2001. I have one internal floppy drive that works and only seems to work with one cable. Moving that between two systems just to find out the drivers don’t work took a few hours tonight. So I’ll give it a rest for now.

BTW – Ubuntu loaded without a hitch. Oh I could go to Vista, it will recognize SATA drives, but I paid my $200 for XP Pro a while back as well as XP Home. If it wasn’t for work I wouldn’t need it… maybe I’ll just have the company fit the bill for a new machine and save me the headache.

We’ll see.

Montreal is cold

Personal,

Last week is was off to Montreal for another week traveling for work. It went ok but would have preferred to have more time than a few days of testing on my piece of the software. But that’s the way it goes.

The week was going as expected until Wednesday evening. We went to an Italian restruant in a small strip mall not far from the hotel, it had a movie theater and a number of choices to eat at. After finishing we came out to the car and a window was broken. A co-worker had is laptop bag taken, minus the laptop, but his passport was in it. So it was off to the nearist station, as the police will not come to you for that, to file a report. Then it was on to the rental car agency at the airport to pick up a new vehicle. We were back to the hotel by 10:30pm. Of all the nights I wanted to get to bed before 1:00am wasn’t thinking it would include a trip to the police station.

Yes it was cold there too, average temp was around 5. It snowed a couple nights and we got to see a bit of it being removed. They clear it with huge snow blowers, front end loaders and dump trucks then haul it off the island. You can really tell a difference between the locals and visitors on the road. If you don’t drive in the stuff very much you get a little rusty. Not to mention the traffic flow is crazy. On many major streets, around the airport at least, their are no left turns. That makes it easy for us visiting to get lost.. but their were only a couple U-Turns for the 6 days.

It’s good to be back home, now I just got to catch up on everything.

Fun in Charlotte

Personal,

This week I was in Charlotte, NC installing beta software for a customer. It has been a while since I’ve been out on the road and this will probably continue for a bit. I had forgotten how long a day can be when you’re face to face and only have moments to multi-task. Two 17 hour days and one 16 hour day, with a 14 hour day thrown in the middle, left me ready to head home. I did get to see some friends (Juan & Jan) while there but couldn’t get to Raliegh to see the others (Chip & Beth). Of course Raliegh isn’t really on the way but it was a good opportunity to try and return a gas grill of their’s. Of course if things hand gone better and I could have turned those days into 8 or 10 hours it would have been more realistic. But that’s the way it goes.

The last time I went to Charlotte it was on a bad u-joint in the truck, not much pull going through the mountains, but this time no problems. Only some wind to deal with and a little rain. Good to be home … next week should be busy with follow up and trying to get ready for Montreal on the 9th. Yes another trip, another beta. Joy !!!!